Cargo Runners for iPad, by Trouble Brothers.
Overview: Sydney wants its coffee, and Cape Town is offering big bucks for a shipment of apparel. Unfortunately the labor strike in Europe is going to make it hard for you to pick up that lumber you were expecting, and the typhoon in the Indian Ocean isn’t great for your travel plans. In Cargo Runners, a new iPad board game from Trouble Brothers available today, you compete with other cargo ships to fulfill the most lucrative contracts.
Cargo Runners board (click to enlarge)
Players: 2 to 4
Ages: 8 and up (though my 4-year-old and 7-year-old have played, with help)
Playing Time: 30 to 45 minutes
Retail: $7.99
Rating: An excellent mix of old-school board gaming sensibilities in the digital age.
Who Will Like It? Cargo Runners was designed by people who like classic board games, and it shows. Although there’s a good bit of die-rolling and luck, there’s still a depth of strategy in a fairly quick-playing game, making it sort of a “Euro-lite” game. If you like playing board games on the iPad, this is worth checking out — though I should note it’s maybe a little more Ticket to Ride than Carcassonne.
Invite your friends to a game, or use Game Center's Auto-Match.
Background:
Before I get into the theme and gameplay, I think it’s worth reminding you a little about the development of the game. I mentioned it in my post Rethinking the Future of Board Games — it started out as a design for an analog board game which wasn’t produced, but then the Trouble Brothers got permission to release it as an iPad app instead, with tweaks to the game to make it better for digital play. The analog version is now in the works as well. Since it’s only a digital game so far, there isn’t an “original” version to compare it to — this is the original version. Be sure to check the “Conclusion” section below for more about how the digital version plays out.
Gameplay:
The goal of the game is to be first to earn the goal amount by fulfilling shipping contracts. The goal amount depends on the number of players, from $8 million for a 4-player game to $12 million for a 2-player game. You earn cash by picking up goods and delivering them to various destinations around the world.
12 randomly-generated contracts, 2 for each home port.
Each player selects a home port, one of the six starred locations (there’s one in each region), which is where their ship starts. Then the game generates 12 random contracts, two at each home port. Contracts that require four different goods are worth less, but those with many of the same good are worth much more (e.g., a contract for four shipments of fruit is worth $4 million, but the one with four different goods is only worth $1 million). It’s also worth noting that each of the six continents is missing one type of cargo, and both of their contracts will include at least one of that good. During your turn you can see all available contracts by tapping and holding the captain icon on the bottom of the screen.
Dice: movement die and event die
During your turn you’ll roll two dice: one is for movement and the other determines the card type that will be drawn. Most cards will go into the card section, which holds up to three cards at a time. You’ll get to take one of the three for use each turn if there are any available; any unclaimed cards stay there (or are replaced by new cards). Some cards, though, have immediate effect: weather events will create storms in one of six random locations, preventing movement; embargoes will prevent you from picking up any goods from an entire continent.
The movement die gives you movement points. Red shipping lanes cost one movement point and yellow international routes cost two points. Any points that you don’t use accumulate, so that if you don’t move for several turns (or use less than your total) then you can save up for a big move all at once. Some die faces also say “switch” or “join,” allowing you to forfeit the movement points shown in order to switch places with or join another ship.
Event cards
There are various types of event cards: cargo-based cards will let you pick up extra cargo at the stop, steal cargo from another player, pick up embargoed cargo, or pick up any type of cargo at a port regardless of what it usually carries. Navigation cards may give you extra points on your movement roll, an extra roll at the end of your turn, allow you to move past weather events, or even let you move to any home port. Communique cards can affect contracts: some let you switch the location of two contracts on the board, or re-open closed contracts, or fulfill a contract at any home port rather than where the contract is located. There are also a few cards which will eliminated a weather event or an embargo. It’s important to note that you can only have one card at a time, and most of the cards aside from Communique cards can’t be held — they must be used on the turn they’re claimed.
Once you’ve rolled the dice, you may then move to a new spot on the board. There, you may pick up one cargo item if you have room on your ship, or if you’re in the ocean you can dump goods. At a home port, if you have the correct combination of goods you can deliver them for the contract amount (which then closes the contract) or you can offload goods for $100,000 per good (if it doesn’t fulfill a contract).
That’s basically it. You sail around, collecting goods and delivering them, racing to be the first to reach the goal. Once a player hits the goal, everyone else gets one more turn and the game ends.
The view automatically zooms in on the active ship.
Conclusion:
Jeff McCord and Steve Shippert at Trouble Brothers put a lot of thought into making the board game work digitally, giving careful consideration about how best to use the computing abilities of the iPad and when to keep things low-tech. For instance, unused movement points are stored — this would have been much more difficult in the analog version, but was added when it became a digital game. Also, during your turn the routes light up to show how far you can travel so you can easily see how far you can go.
However, there are some things that would have been possible on the digital version which they intentionally chose not to include. I’d asked about highlighting contracts which match your current ship’s contents since that would make it easier to spot what you need to pick up next — McCord and Shippert told me that they’d considered that, but felt that it would reveal too much about your possible plans to other players. Another example is that the game is designed to be played with the iPad on the table and people sitting around it: each player takes one side of the board and their icons and controls appear on their edge of the screen. What it means, though, is that instead of a pass-and-play set up, there’s only one player that sees the screen right-side up, as it would be in an analog board game. On the multiplayer mode, however, each person sees the screen right-side up with the other players arrayed around the other edges, so that’s a nice touch.
Now, about the game itself. I tried out the game a few times, first by myself just to fiddle with the controls and learn the rules. Then, because my kids were asking about it, I sat down and played it with them. Being only 4 and 7, they’re a bit younger than the age recommendation, but neither of them had much trouble learning the controls. (My 4-year-old needed help reading some on-screen instructions, but quickly picked up most of the icons for the event cards.) Of course the strategy was a bit beyond them, but they enjoyed the game and I got to see how a full game plays out.
Where I really got a chance to experience the game, though, was playing an online multiplayer game with McCord and Shippert. We got the game set up while also doing a Skype phone call so we could chat about board games and the game design, and it was a pretty cool experience. I got trounced pretty handily by Shippert, who was responsible for the math behind the contracts and has a knack for figuring out the best contracts to go for. But before I lost I did manage to switch out a few contracts and make it a little harder for him to grab the victory.
Because of the dice and the randomization of the weather events and embargoes, there is a lot of luck involved. However, you do have some amount of control in how you respond to the events on the board, and which contracts you choose to pursue. You can try for head-to-head competition by beating somebody to a contract that it looks like they’re aiming for, or you can try to go for other goods that can be just as lucrative.
You can only pick up goods after moving, so you can’t sit on a port and collect the same cargo over and over again, which is what makes those $4 million contracts so hard to get — you have to move away from the port, and then get back to it to get more of the same good. This also allows for some interesting strategies, because when you move away somebody else can move into a port — which also prevents you from collecting cargo there.
I did feel sometimes that the card randomization seemed a bit off; in the game I played with my daughters I felt that there were too many storms and embargoes and very few cards that let me remove those. However, the designers explained that the cards do work like an actual deck: there’s a certain number of each card and when they’re used, they go in a “discard” pile which won’t go back into the mix until the “draw” pile is exhausted. I suppose it’s similar to when you feel like you’re not rolling any 7s in Settlers and the bandit is just sitting on your territory forever — the odds are that you’ll roll a 7 eventually, but sometimes the reality is that the dice aren’t cooperating.
One other rule that was initially confusing was that I wasn’t sure which cards had to be used right away and which could be held for future turns. I don’t think it specifically spells it out in the Quick Rules, so it’s something you just learn by playing. That’s one difference between a digital and analog game: you don’t have a big manual to flip through to answer this sort of question, and there’s more of an expectation that players will just jump into the gameplay and figure it out as they go along. That said, it is a game that videogame-savvy kids will probably be able to pick up and just fiddle with to learn the rules.
The game doesn’t currently have any sort of chat function, though that’s planned for a future update. I know from playing other online multiplayer games that having chat is great for when you’re playing with friends, but isn’t always necessary when you use Auto-match to just play against a random stranger. Still, that’s definitely a feature on my wish list. You do get to see all the other person’s moves as they’re making them, though, and that’s pretty fun to watch and still a great part of playing board games on a digital device.
McCord and Shippert mentioned that the original game had cards you held in your hand, which they changed so that you could play on a shared screen, but I think the game works well without the hidden information. It was also a longer game as a board game, because they felt that people will sit and play an analog board game for a couple of hours, but generally playing on a device they expect shorter games. So the game time has been shortened to 30-45 minutes, which felt about right. I could probably play for a bit longer myself, but I think it’s certainly quick enough that you don’t lose interest.
Overall, I think Cargo Runners is a great entry in the digital board game field. The look of it is inspired by old classic board games and I really like the combination of the retro graphics with the animations and computer-enabled bells and whistles. There are certainly some things that could be improved (Carcassonne is still, in my mind, one of the best board game implementations for iOS) but it’s clear that Trouble Brothers has spent a lot of time working out the gameplay and interface, and that they’ve learned some lessons about the world of digital games since the release of Wizard Hex earlier this year.
I’d recommend Cargo Runners to anyone who is a fan of lighter Euro-games. If you don’t mind the mixture of luck and strategy (and you like boats), it’s a very fun game.
Wired: Excellent board game feel for a digital-only game, online multiplayer, good use of digital tech without overdoing it.
Tired: A few interface issues, some rules not entirely clear until playing.
Disclosure: GeekDad was given an advance trial of the game for review purposes.
